When All's Said and Done
by Sylphie3000
Summary: The Apocalypse waits for no man, and apparently neither does Fate. Fallout 4 Soulmate AU.
1. Chapter 1

Nick wakes, swathed in the warmth of his bed against the cool Boston air coming in from the window. The air smells distantly of the coffee Jenny must have made before heading to work, and of cleaner. Which is odd, considering that Boston typically smells like the bad end of a dog, but the neighbors _are_ entitled to a little cleaning every now and again. God knows he needs to tidy up, after all.

He lays there for a while yet, eyes closed, and takes in the feel of his apartment. The building sighs with the movement of the other residents, the air hanging with nostalgia and a sadness he can't quite place but grows stronger over time. It's… _nice_. Peaceful. He hasn't felt like this for a while. He's missed just allowing himself to just be, to exist.

But all things come to an end, and he stretches, scrunching his eyes against the bright, late-morning light and reaches with one hand for a pack of cigarettes on his nightstand.

There is one problem with this plan. Problem being, there aren't any cigarettes.

Worse, there's no nightstand. Just cold, hard linoleum under his reaching fingers. The hazy warmth of the bed starts to dissolve around him, replaced by an overwhelming sense of dread.

Nick's eyes snap open only to squint shut again against the harsh fluorescent light. _This_ , he will decide later, when he looks back on it, is the biggest mistake of his life.

Instead of the familiar walls of his apartment, he's in a room like a hospital quarantine chamber, white linoleum on the floors and pristine walls that only amplify the unsettling prickle on his skin. Nick himself is tucked away in a corner, lying prone on the floor, one hand outstretched. His skin looks almost paperwhite in the sanitized lighting, and when he flexes his fingers it doesn't quite feel like it's _his_ hand that's moving.

"Hello?" he says, voice hoarse and echoing off the blank, windowless walls. When the door directly across from him doesn't open and no answer springs forth from the plaster, he takes his chances moving. He pushes himself into a tense crouch, back to the wall, in one smooth motion - which is unnerving, considering the pain hunching over his desk for months on end has been giving him. Not that anything about this situation _isn't_ unnerving, but that ache has been his constant companion for almost a year, ever since he quit field work, ever since…

 _Jenny_.

Well.

 _There goes the rest of_ that _good dream_ , he thinks, swallowing the lump in his throat, and stands the rest of the way up despite the long-familiar sinking pit in his stomach making a return.

In a corner, a camera fixed to the ceiling _whirrs_ to focus on his face. It looks like the same model the Boston Police Department uses in their interrogation rooms; manually operated, the blurry, greyscale footage used mostly in court, but the red eye that's boring into his own now has unnerved many a would-be criminal into talking.

But what on Earth did he _do_? The Boston Police Department and the jails are the only places he can think of that use those specific cameras, but he knows the PD inside and out and he's never seen a room like this in his life. So, jail? Doesn't make sense, given that this doesn't look like a prison cell. No bars, no toilet, nothing that makes it seem like he's supposed to live here.

Which begs the question: if not prison, or the Boston PD, then where the _hell_ is he?

There's only one way to find out.

He takes a single, slow step into the center of the room, towards that camera, and it's then that he notices three things:

One, the floor is farther away than it should be.

Two, he is naked as a jaybird.

And last but most importantly, his body is _not his own_.

Tall and thin, muscled, whiter than a piece of paper, and as sexless as a doll, the arms and hands and feet that are responding to the mounting panic are _not_ _his._

The fingers that reach up to card through hair rake over an empty scalp, trip over a seam on the top of a head that's _not Nick's_.

His heartbeat kicks up a notch and is accompanied by a soft, uncomfortable buzz that grows louder by the second. That empty pit in his stomach that's been there since Jenny died grows with it, swallowing his mind in unrelenting blackness.

Strikingly, before mechanics he doesn't understand, doesn't even know he _has_ , overheat and he falls back into unconsciousness, he notices he doesn't have any fingernails, just the crescent shape of a cuticle etched into skin far too pale to ever be human.

 _Fingernails_ , of all things.

When Nick wakes up again, he's in a crumpled heap a few steps off the center of the room. Now, there are no illusions. No soft bed, no traffic to greet him when he wakes up.

He curls into the fetal position on the floor, scrambling to remember something, _anything_ , from therapy. Breathing techniques, counting, distractions, anything to take him away from that damn _morgue_ , from her corpse, her funeral, the sheer pain of it all. He doesn't open his eyes, or move. Whatever kind of body he got stuck in has a disturbing knack for staying still as the grave, and in an odd way it's almost comforting.

After a time, he resorts to the only distraction available to him short of waiting for Hell to freeze over, and traces his fingers over his hands, his legs, his face. Trying to explore the unfamiliar hills and valleys of this body without any way to look at them. Not that he'd _want_ to, anyways, what with how well it went last time. It's easier to move if he doesn't have to look at that inhuman off-white skin, he finds, and in his own blindness he memorizes this new body that responds to his commands while his mind floats somewhere in the corner, silent and grieving.

He doesn't know the date, but he knows how long he's been on the floor down to the second - hours at first, when he discovers that his mouth is dry and brushes against the wires in the back of his throat without any pain, despite whatever's left of a gag reflex kicking in.

Three days when he finds the vents along his neck and down his sides. They're small and very well hidden unless one runs their fingers against the grain.

Four when he risks opening his eyes in a final confirmation that he - if he's even Nick Valentine, at this point - is not human.

He lays there for so long he forgets to care, and tries to force these hands that somehow _are_ and _are not_ his to bend. He doesn't know if it's because they're not his hands, or because the linoleum underneath them reflects the glow of his eyes and he hates it.

Because of course his eyes glow, of course he knows the time like his own name and _of course_ he can hear the sound of whatever mechanics power this shell he's stuck in instead of a human heartbeat. Whatever he is, he's not Nick anymore. Not really, he thinks, because Valentine was five-foot-six and not the solid six-foot he is now, and had thick brown hair and hazel eyes that didn't _glow,_ God damn it.

And fingernails. It never occurred to him that robots wouldn't have fingernails, or that lacking them would bother him more than other bits that were more important, like a _heart_ , or a _liver_ , or a _dick_. All, unfortunately, missing.

Out of habit, or perhaps out of morbid curiosity, he runs his fingers along his right shoulder, where the dips and curves of Jenny's name, penned in the elegant golden cursive worthy of a reporter once crawled it's way across his skin. Back when he was still Nick With a Pulse, before he'd ever even met Jennifer Lands, he used to trace the lines of the tattoo for comfort. Jenny's dead now, of course, and Nick is… gone. Probably. Somehow.

Regardless, he'd hoped to find that tattoo there. To restore his humanity, or something just as intangible. He traces the swirls of his soulmate's cursive around a shoulder that isn't his with unfamiliar fingers. Even if the mark isn't there and Jenny's been dead for God knows how long, he keeps her name with him, under his fingers and in whatever computer's clanging around in his head in place of a brain.

That hole in his sternum grows and swallows him again while the camera watches from the ceiling.

He doesn't stand up.

And eventually, he doesn't wake up either.


	2. Chapter 2

_Cold_. Heart-wrenching, blood stopping, mind numbing _cold_. She's frozen in place, on the brink of panic but she can't quite remember why.

Her head hurts, either from the angle or the weight of her hair, but she has one _massive_ migraine coming on.

She can't feel her nose or fingers - or, when she takes stock of what hurts and what doesn't, anything from the knees down. It's a wonder she's still standing, to be honest. If she _is_ still standing, that is. Everything's hazy, but she remembers standing.

Why is she standing? And why is the air colder than Boston on Christmas?

She should've brought gloves. She would've, if she'd known the Vault was going to be like _this_.

It takes effort, but she opens her frost-crusted eyes. She's surrounded by grey paneling, settled into a metal array in a position that grows more uncomfortable the longer she's aware of it. In front of her, an opaque window grants her a small glimpse of the hallway.

 _This… isn't a shower,_ she thinks, and blinks dumbly at the window. _What_?

Wait.

She's in the _Vault_. As in, Vault 101. The nuclear bomb shelter. For when everything goes to hell.

Hysteria rises again in her gut like the jagged edge of a knife and she throws herself against the door with her full weight. It shudders open under her pounding hands and at last - at _long, long last_ \- she's free of that wretched chill.

An alarm sounds immediately when she falls face first onto the floor, shivering and curled into herself. Something about evacuation, an error in the system. _Yeah, no kidding._ Regardless, between that and the stale, tomblike air of the hall, her panic gives way to a trepidation that makes it that much harder to warm up.

It's there, thawing on the floor, curled into the fetal position in a desperate bid to dull the pain of regaining feeling in her extremities and to stop the uncontrollable shaking, that she remembers herself. Angela Castro, community college dropout, twenty-one years old and apparent survivor of the fucking Apocalypse.

Angela pushes herself into a kneel, too unsteady on her feet after who-knows-how-long in a freezer to stand.

A _freezer_ , she thinks, and wipes her hands on her thaw-drenched vault suit. Meant to preserve, most likely, but for how long?

In front of her is another freezer-pod, but unlike the others she can't see inside through the thick layer of frost. A glimpse at the pods around her accounts for some of her neighbors from Sanctuary Hills, an older couple from out of town, and her mother.

Nora Castro lies in the pod next to Angela's, gray-streaked hair in a bob around her face and lipstick pristine as the morning the bombs fell. However long ago that was. Could be yesterday, a week ago, a year, a century.

That's the thing, though - if everyone's been on ice for however long, and Angela's out now, then why is everyone else still unconscious?

She struggles to stand, but manages despite the dread weighing down her stomach, using the ridged edge of her pod as a much-needed prop. For a second, she thinks the dials on the control panel to her mother's chamber is broken; the only hand on any of the three faces that's reading anything is the temperature gauge at negative one-ninety-six degrees celcius.

Then, that sneaking dread in the hollow of her stomach returns to it's comfort zone as of late: white, searing panic. She flips the lever on the panel with fumbling fingers, prays to any God that's still with her that it opens.

"Malfunction in Cryo-pod Manual Release Override," the speaker tells her, and the panic seeps through her veins, into her bones, so cold it burns.

They're _trapped_.

Angela's knuckles are white around the lever, straining with the death grip she has on it. Her breath hitches with a sob as she takes a miniscule step backwards, and the air of the room is a wire strung tight, so close to breaking.

Slowly, she drags her eyes to the pod behind her, the one across the hall from her own, and with a clarity she didn't know she'd be able to conjure she knows who's inside. Worse, she knows who's not.

She doesn't remember the shaky, lunging steps to that iced-over freezer, or when she started crying, but when her head clocks back in the door is swinging open and she's face to face with a corpse. Her stepfather, to be exact, slouched over his chest, a dark stain spread over his stomach and minus one infant child.

He fought tooth and nail for her baby brother, she _saw_ it. By God _,_ she remembers. He died with Nora's name on his lips, his eyes locked on what little he could've seen of her face from his pod.

A laugh echoes through her memory, cold and ruthless, belonging to a bald mercenary with a scar and the smile of a man that's taken lives and enjoyed it.

Angela takes his hand, presses his fingers to her forehead, and hopes he wasn't in pain when he died. Which, given what she knows about stomach wounds and stomach _acid,_ isn't likely.

She stands there, shaking, until her legs ache and the lifeless hand she's holding starts to hit room temperature. It could just be that her own hands are still cold from the freezer, but even so, it wouldn't do for him to start to _rot_.

With a heavy, shuddering sigh, she takes a step back from him. The soldier, the husband, the father - her father, dead. Just like that. The thought shatters something inside her and the tears start again, buckling her knees and she falls, her fingers still wrapped around Nate's like a vice.

It is, eventually, the fear of decay that makes her shut the pod. She makes him as comfortable as possible in the small array and brushes damp hair off his death-gray face. On an impulse, she slips his thick, golden wedding ring off his left hand. She wants - needs, if she's being honest with herself - _something_ to keep her parents with her. Something that means that she doesn't have to say goodbye. Not yet, anyways.

Not until she gets her baby brother back.

With the ring held tight in her hand, she steps back from Nate's pod.

 _Right_ , she thinks, taking a shaky breath and turning towards the entrance. _First things first: find a decent shirt, and then get the hell out of here._


End file.
